Abstract
This article contains two parts. In the first part, we review recent studies on social support and define three new trends in the area of social support research. The first trend is recent increment of studies examining the relationship between social support concepts and some other concepts in social psychology. The second trend is a series of studies re-examining social support process from the viewpoint of more general features of social interaction process. The third trend is the emphasis of roles of various ecological factors in social support processes. All of these three trends are considered to have impacts on future directions of this area of research. In the second part, we report results of the studies in which we examined the relationship between social support and family stress and individual stress in a situation of job-induced separation. This examination is considered to be related with the third trend reported in the first part. The results revealed that the social support, on the one hand, buffer negative effects of stressful life events on family and individual adaptation, but on the other hand, the buffering effects may have a limitation.
